Gruntled Employees

Managing change

I hate change.

No, not that kind of change. I really like "change" change. I want to be a change agent. My favorite song is Bowie's "Changes." Favorite movie: A Change of Seasons. And I'm all about Barack Obama's "Change you can believe in" slogan. (OK, none of those last three is remotely true. Just making a point here.)

No, the change I loathe is the money kind. Coins. Specie. Bullion.

You could say I'm an antinumismatist (although it's hard to). It's possible that I'm a chrometophobe, although that seems a stretch.

I hate how change wears a hole in my pants pocket, and how it jangles like a cowbell when I'm trying to sneak up on my associates to catch them playing Solitaire on their computers. (Hey, we don't bill by the hour, so how am I supposed to know if they're working?) (OK, another complete falsehood: our office is all Mac. Playing Solitaire is a strictly Windows activity.)

Change is also a leading indicator of personality. You can tell a lot about a cashier just by giving him or her five ones for an extra-large coffee and a blueberry muffin costing $4.01, as I did this morning at Dunkin' Donuts. You see, there are two types of cashiers in the world. The good kind, like the one this morning, count the bills, smile at you, and hand you the fifth dollar back. Your $4.01 breakfast just cost you $4.00. In some ways, this is the karmic payoff for all those times you receive a few grubby pennies back in change, which you then leave on the counter for a future unknown someone who's short a few cents.

The bad kind of cashier takes your five singles, then proceeds to count out 99 cents worth of copper-plated zinc and cupronickel alloy, which tears at your pocket linings while making you sound like an extra reindeer in your grade-school Christmas pageant.

This taxonomy of change-handlers isn't limited to cashiers. In fact, there are two types of people in the world: the "don't worry about the pennies" people and the "here's your change" people. The "don't worry about the pennies" people get what's important in life: giving you your caffeinated and sugar-infused sustenance, and getting more or less the right amount of cash in return (in this case, to within 99.75% accuracy). The "here's your change" people are so fixated on the bureaucratic administrivia that they can't understand that they're ruining the entire coffee-and-muffin ritual.

The bottom line: Only hire "don't worry about the pennies" people as managers and HR professionals. Give candidates a single-question entrance exam with the above coffee scenario. If you end up with a pocketful of bullion, take your money and run ... away from that candidate.

Massachusetts: closed for business

States spend skitillions of dollars (a skitillion is one followed by a wad of zeroes, or ten to the wad) on catchy slogans and jingles to lure gullible businesses to open plants and offices there. If you're from Massachusetts and of a certain age (that is, you now enjoy your federal age-discrimination rights), you probably still suffer from that dreaded 1970s earworm, "Makin' It in Massachusetts." Oh, those clever double entendres!

Anyway, the Commonwealth can stop spending tax dollars on musical lures for businesses because they're leaving and they ain't coming back. Why?

Treble damages. (Not to be confused with "treble entendres.") ("Treble" is a slightly fancy way for lawyers to say "triple." As in, "Jacoby Ellsbury just trebled to the triangle at Fenway. He's wicked good.") (Hey, it's a Massachusetts-themed post, OK?)

Here's the 411: The Massachusetts legislature passed Senate Bill No. 1059 into law on April 14, making treble damages mandatory for an employer’s violation of the Commonwealth’s wage-and-hour laws. Employees bringing claims over the payment of wages, minimum wage, or overtime could win three times the actual damages they suffered — even when the violation is inadvertent. The law, which passed when Governor Deval Patrick declined to veto it, overturns a 2005 decision of the Supreme Judicial Court that limited treble damages to cases involving an employer’s “willful misconduct.”

Previously, the statute left it up to the judge to determine whether an employer had maliciously violated the wage law before awarding treble damages. This allowed the court to distinguish between employers who intentionally deprived workers of their earned wages and employers who stumbled over the confusing technicalities of the wage laws. In Wiedmann v. The Bradford Group, the Massachusetts high court confirmed that the law gave judges the discretion to award treble damages to willful offenders. It was this case that the legislature overturned with the amended statute.

The new legislation becomes effective on July 13, 2008, and will govern all cases filed thereafter. What is uncertain is whether the law will have retroactive effect over earlier cases. Language in the legislation says that it was intended to “clarify the existing law and to reiterate the original intention of the general court that triple damages are mandatory.” (Ironically, the old statute’s legislative history makes clear that this was not the “original intention.") This language will encourage plaintiffs’ attorneys to argue that the law should be applied retroactively. If this argument prevails, all pending wage claims — and perhaps even those that have not yet been filed — would be subject to mandatory treble damages. We expect there will be hard-fought litigation over this issue.

With the passage of this new law, Massachusetts becomes the first state in the nation to make treble damages mandatory in wage-and-hour cases. With wage claims and class-action lawsuits already on the rise, Massachusetts now becomes the jurisdiction of choice for plaintiffs. (At least someone will be makin' it in Massachusetts.) Employers must be more careful than ever to ensure that they are complying with the Commonwealth’s wage laws.

What employers can do

• Pay your employees on time — especially when they depart.
• Make sure they’re properly classified as exempt or nonexempt.
• Have your employment counsel audit your pay practices.

In the meantime, Go Sox!

[Shout out to Steve Reed for his spot-on legal analysis.]

Of sticker shock and empathy

I'll never forget the stickers from the night before my wedding. On the other hand, my brother Bill probably can't remember them.

Because of the fumes.

Let me explain:

Just before the wedding, my bride-to-be had everything under control. The flowers were set, the caterer was prepared, the ceremony site was ready. She was as calm as a bride can be. But then a friend of my parents asked what should have been an innocuous question:

"What are you doing for wedding favors?"

Wedding favors? Now to me, "wedding favors" was as foreign a concept as "centerpieces" and, well, "marriage." Turns out "wedding favors" are defined (by Wikipedia) as "small gifts given as a gesture of appreciation or gratitude to guests from the bride and groom during a wedding ceremony or a wedding reception." Who knew?

Alarm bells replaced wedding bells! This was a crisis of the first degree! Fortunately, the inquiring family friend was quick to provide a suggestion: small silver picture frames in which we could place cards telling each guest where they'd sit at the reception. Then they could take their frames home and toss the seat cards and replace them with pictures of their cats, or whatever. (This was 12 years ago, before there were blogs.) Brilliant!

My fiancée sped to the local Christmas Tree Shops, a New England bargain store that specializes in little knickknacks. Amazingly, Heidi found a bunch of little frames similar to the one in the cheesy picture above. She immediately bought 150 of them and brought them back to me. My job was to do the desktop publishing: make nice calligraphic seat cards with each guest's name and table number. That job was hard enough. My brother's job was much worse.

He had to do the stickers.

You see, every single one of these little silver frames had a silver UPC sticker on it. Not so much on the frame, though. On the glass! And the glue on these stickers must have been that kind of glue they use for keeping those tiles from falling off the Space Shuttle. The stickers themselves fell apart if you tried to scrape or pick them off.

Since he was best man, Bill's job was to remove the stickers. The only hope was to use some high-powered chemical solvent and a razor blade, which is what Bill did for hours in the underventilated living room of my apartment. Twelve years later, he's still not the same. (Actually, he's fine, though he lives in Oklahoma, which is odd.) (His living there; not the state itself.)

Anyway, this brings me to my point: the frame-maker forgot about empathy. Someone at Cheapo Frames Unlimited or whatever made a decision to put bar-code stickers on the glass part of the frame. Maybe he or she did it because the store would need to scan the stickers at the cash register. Maybe it helped with inventory control. But I guarantee you that the sticker decision-maker lacked the critical character trait of empathy — namely, empathy with the customer who was going to be using the cheapo frame. He or she never stopped to think how the customer would feel when confronted with the unremovable sticker. He or she never wondered how the customer would be able to see the wedding guest's table number (or how the guest would later see the cat picture) through the permanent label that obscured the frame's transparent glass face. The frame-company decision maker had no empathy for the customer.

And neither did his or her supervisors. Neither did the owner of Cheapo Frames Unlimited. Neither did the buyer at Christmas Tree Shops.

Having empathy for the customer — or the end user of a product or service — is an undervalued, underpromoted, and undertrained quality in today's business world. Here are some examples where empathy for the customer or end user is missing:

• The people who package children's toys. In their quest to thwart the one or two percent of toy-store customers who would steal accessories out of a Dora the Explorer package, or whatever, they tie everything down with wire, then tape it to the inside of the box. It takes twenty minutes to free your kid's toy from its package. The manufacturer didn't think about how unhappy that delay would make the child, or her dad.
• Customer support lines that play recorded advertisements for the product you're having trouble with while you wait 31 minutes for a live human being. My particular favorite is when you call your internet provider because you can't connect, and the recording tells you that you can get answers to your questions at www.whatever.com. Uh, no I can't ... The company never thought about how that would sound to a frustrated customer.
• Billboards that have the same tiny little text at the bottom that a print ad has. I'm driving 60 miles an hour past your billboard; how am I supposed to read the little text? Obviously, the art designer didn't think about the driver's ability to actually read it (or didn't care if it was read).
• Lawyers who fill their letters, contracts, and briefs with pompous and stuffy legalese. Don't they want the reader to actually be able to read it?
• For that matter, lawyers who bill by the hour. Don't they wonder how the client is going to feel when she gets a bill showing that it cost her more money because it took longer for her to get what she wanted?

Managers need to make sure that everyone in the workplace thinks about what the customer is going to do with the product or service, and how the customer is going to feel about it. That's empathy, and it's critical to a company's success.

Seth Godin has written about this before in his excellent blog. See his post from three years ago called, simply, "Care." And Becky Carroll at Customers Rock! blog has a nice post on empathy called "Empathy Matters."

As for the wedding favors, they were a hit at the reception, Heidi and I are still married 12 years later, and Bill's only a little woozy from the solvent fumes.

Watch your wiki

Managers and HR professionals have to pay attention to their employees. It's right there in the job description. Monitoring work, evaluating performance, tracking compliance. Sometimes, for various reasons, they have to pay attention to other things: an employee's computer files, email or internet usage, or MySpace page.

Well, now there's something else to monitor.

As you probably know, Wikipedia is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." It is the world's largest wiki, which is a website that people can collaboratively draft and revise. (I often try to throw handy, helpful Wikipedia links into posts.) It's a great resource for quickly learning about basically anything. As Steve Carell's character Michael Scott said on "The Office":

Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.

Mind you, this came in the same episode where Michael said this:

It was a crime of passion, Jan. Not a disgruntled employee. Everyone here is extremely gruntled.

(Remind me to get my lawyers after NBC.) (Or as NBC calls them, "law stylists.")

Anyway, since anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry, nearly anyone does. Many Wikipedia contributors and editors log in to a free Wikipedia account, and make their contributions and edits "in the clear." But many others make their points anonymously, which can lead to abuse. Imagine a disgruntled employee firing up Wikipedia (anonymously, or perhaps pseudonymously), then amending her company's Wikipedia entry to include the intraoffice illicit affairs going on in the Sales Department. Or the secret cross-dressing in Accounting. Or whatever.

People can also embellish their company's Wikipedia entry. Dave Hoffman over at Concurring Opinions had a piece last summer about Wikipedia users at major law firms changing entries to "burnish their reputations and trash their competitors." See "A Slow Day at the Office: Lawyers Editing on Wikipedia." Robert Ambrogi had a similar collection at his LawSites blog.

But there's hope for HR pros and managers looking to see what their wiki-wielding workers (OK, I promise I won't do that again) are doing to their corporate entries. Last year, Cal Tech grad student and hacker extraordinaire Virgil Griffith created WikiScanner, a tool that links Wikipedia edits to the companies and organizations owning the computers that made the edits. In other words, say you're sitting at your desk at Dow Chemical, and you want to anonymously remove references on the Dow Wikipedia entry to Bhopal or breast implants. You make your changes and lurk off into the night. But WikiScanner will rat you out, by cross-referencing the IP address of your Dow computer to the IP addresses known to be assigned to Dow. While WikiScanner can't identify your particular machine, it's likely that the company's IT geek squad can narrow it down to your station.

Wired magazine wrote an article last year announcing WikiScanner and including a list of the most salacious edits, including the Dow example I cited, plus edits from Diebold, Exxon, and the Church of Scientology. (No word on whether Tom Cruise's IP address has shown up yet.) An employee at Wal-Mart, everyone's favorite employer, edited the entry to say that workers there were underpaid (here).

To be sure, searches on WikiScanner will probably show you that most employees are editing entries on "buttock cleavage" (found on the computers at the US House of Representatives here) or "Hispanic porn stars" (ditto) or "chest hair" (ditto). (Not to be outdone, the US Senate — here — appears interested in "cow tipping," "fast casual dining restaurants," and whether Han shot first in the cantina.) (He did.)

But if your company is big enough to merit its own Wikipedia entry (and by "merit," I mean that you or one of your coworkers wrote one), then you may want to check in with WikiScanner and see if your employees are trashing your company or its customers.

Or maybe they're just sharing "canker-sore stories" (yep, the Senate again).

[Big shout out to Christopher Mirabile, long-time Gruntled reader and idea-generator, for pointing out the WikiScanner phenomenon.]

Dear [insert name]: You're fired

Our very first post was about RadioShack's submoronic firing of 400 employees last year by email (see "Radio Shack Deletes 400 Workers, Common Sense"). Now, the blogosphere is abuzz with CompUsa's decision to close its remaining stores (see CNNMoney article) and its soulless form letter notifying its employees. The excellent tech blog Engadget included what it describes as a copy of the form letter sent to employees in a biting post, "CompUSA sends out layoff letters: bad service extends to employees, too." Here is the letter, taken from the Engadget post (the store number and location were previously redacted, which is lawyerspeak for blotted out):

Now I can't personally vouch for the authenticity of the letter, and Engadget describes its source as an anonymous CompUSA employee. Nor could I confirm the identity of CompUSA's HR director, although there is an HR person with that name in the DFW metropolitan area. It certainly looks like an authentic WARN Act letter, which the government requires.

But what a letter. I appreciate that CompUSA had a lot of employees to fire, but couldn't they have bothered to insert the unlucky recipient's name in each letter? (You know, guys, they have computers that can do that now.) Did they need to keep reminding the fired worker that CompUSA is incorporated (at least for now) — four times in a three-paragraph letter? Couldn't they get a human being to actually sign the letter? Repeating the name in boldfaced italics doesn't count.

You're firing people. Have the decency to act like it means something to you. It certainly means something to the employees. A personalized letter — or even a seemingly personalized mail-merged special — with a real human being's signature makes a difference. It might not seem like a lot — it might even seem like a waste of time — but people notice these things.

Getting fired sucks. But getting fired suckily (by email, by form letter, during the holidays) sucks even more. Worse, it makes the fired employees more disgruntled, and thus more likely to sue. You've already messed up the big things (running your company into the ground); at least try not to mess up the little things.

Bonus irony note: Check out CompUSA's tagline:

Obviously they didn't get it. They didn't get it at all.

Here are some other voices on the topic:

• Tampa Bay's Channel 10 News has a story on the company's remarkable retention-bonus scheme: if you work the next two months until the store closes, you get — wait for it — a whole week's pay! (Woo.) The station has posted a PDF of the "Separation Bonus Plan"; the story is here: "Employees cry foul over CompUSA closings"
• The incomparable New York Times technology columnist David Pogue had this explanation for the company's failure back when they began their store closings last March: "The Gutting of CompUSA."
• The always excellent HR Capitalist has this great post on how another stumbling company, Circuit City, tried to lure back some of their previously fired, higher-paid workers at a lower wage: "Circuit City - We Fired You, Please Present This Coupon to Get Your Old Job Back for Less Pay..."
• That particular move garnered Circuit City a spot on the Fortune "Top 101 Dumbest Moments in Business 2007."

*******

[Updated 20 December 2007 to clarify the Circuit City references, and to add more on what CompUSA could have done right. Big shout out to Martin Ebel, the top Commonwealth of Massachusetts civil-rights lawyer and frequent Gruntled commenter (which is different from a commentator). Another big shout out to Christopher Mirabile, world-class general counsel, for pointing out the Engadget post.]

Email and the environment

I, like you, get too much email. Just a few weeks ago, I got to the extreme of having 10,000 (an actual number, not an example of hyperbole) emails in my in box. Which is not useful. What is more, as the newer emails fell off the bottom of my mail-app window, it was as if they no longer really existed (I still had them, I just couldn't see them, and therefore probably wouldn't do anything about them). I can see why noted Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig declared "email bankruptcy" awhile back.

(In fact, I found a better solution at 43 Folders, the blog of lifehacker extraordinaire Merlin Mann. It's called the Inbox Zero method, and it totally rocks. Everything you need to know is here. The video of Merlin's lecture at Google alone is worth the price of admission. OK, admission is free, but you get my drift.)

Anyway, speaking of email, I'm starting to notice that more people are including in their email footer the following message:

Please consider the environment before printing this email.

(It's not usually in green like that. I just did it that way for ironic effect.) The thinking being that the pithy admonition will, as it spreads across the world like a virus, eventually spare a forest or two from being unnecessarily felled. The message has spawned many reactions in the blogosphere. Many are quaint — "My friend, who is soooo green, has this great little email signature ..." Like the guy cured polio or something. Some reactions are less admiring, and often more amusing; see Trying My Patience, for example. Freakonomics coauthor Stephen J. Dubner poked fun at the tagline when it was used in an email that was selling private-jet travel. Because that will help lessen your carbon footprint.

But I have to admit that when I first saw the tagline, I misunderstood its point. The email that carried the tag related to an employment-discrimination case I was working on, so I thought the author was saying, "Consider the office environment if you print it out because someone might read it." I was thinking litigation, not conservation. And while the environmentally sensitive message is a valid one (and we should all stop reflexively printing out emails that we're going to save on our hard drives), the litigationally sensitive message that I inferred is equally valid.

And really, the bigger message should be: "Please consider the office environment before you even send this email." Because 13 years of litigating employment cases have shown me that emails lose lawsuits. All the time. People write the stupidest things in their emails because they think they're having an informal electronic conversation with their buddies. But unlike a face-to-face colloquy, where the words evaporate after they're spoken, emails live forever. And lawyers can find them later. And lawyers will find them. And they will beat you with them.

Make sure you train your employees and managers about the dangers of email. Tell them not to say anything in an email that anyone will find offensive. Because you can't control what happens to your words after you hit "Send." Save the potentially offensive things for private, face-to-face conversations. Or, you know, maybe avoid the whole offensive bit in the first place.

Oh, and please consider the environment before printing this post.

Shaking the trees

First a note: It's a standard trick in the blogosphere that you can cover up your inexcusable failure to post for ... well ... a while (what do you mean I missed November?) by doing a handy site redesign. Thus the new site design. In truth, the standard TypePad theme that this blog wore for more than a year was getting a little threadbare. It was time for something a little cleaner and more ... gruntled. (OK, no more ellipses.) That said, you can expect some tweaking over the next few weeks. As always, I appreciate your feedback. And if you're reading this by email or RSS reader, click here to see the new design.

Now the real post:

We're hiring another lawyer at Shepherd Law Group right now, so we've been conducting interviews and meeting a lot of potential new associates. Which means shaking a lot of hands. Some shake well, and some shake less well. Turns out there's a skill to it. Maybe even a science.

As reported in BusinessWeek recently, a firm handshake is a sign of "social dominance." Psychologist Gordon Gallup found that men with firm handshakes were more likely to behave aggressively. They were also more likely to have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and they were 10% more promiscuous. (Unclear whether that was because of the shoulder-hip thing, the aggressiveness thing, or the handshake thing.)

Gallup's study found no correlation between women's handshakes and either their "behavioral competitiveness" or body type.

Gallup hails from the State University of New York at Albany, which you probably call "SUNY Albany" but which apparently prefers "UAlbany" as its "officially designated informal name," because nobody told them that you can't officially designate an informal anything. In the money quote from the university's press release, Gallup makes a connection between handshakes and our evolution from tree-climbing monkeys:

Unique to the evolutionary history of humans and all primates were complex adaptations to life in the trees. As a result, handgrip strength was featured prominently in patterns of brachiating, or moving through the canopy, as well as in minimizing the chances of falling.

Uh, okay. The press release is here, and the full report (which only uses the word "brachiation" once) is here. (It's a form of arboreal locomotion, in case you were wondering.)

Coincidentally, and more relevantly to the workplace, The Boston Globe recently reviewed a new book by Tonya Reiman called The Power of Body Language. Apparently, the book has a lot say about handshakes. I haven't read it yet, but see this from Vivianne Rodrigues's review:

The handshake is one of the most critical opportunities to establish rapport and might be as crucial for job applicants as a strong résumé, Reiman said.

Her book lists no less than 12 "wrong" ways to shake hands including the submissive handshake, the overly affectionate, the sweaty, the forward lean, but none as dreaded and as dreadful as the limp handshake.

"The limp handshake feels like you're holding a lump of room-temperature chicken," she said.

The way that will work with any person in any situation, according to Reiman, is to go toward the person, lean slightly forward, look them in the eye, extend the right hand, and simultaneously introduce yourself. The whole handshake should not last more than two to three seconds.

Sounds about right. So my question for you HR pros and managers: are your employees shaking hands properly, or they falling out of the trees (so to speak)?

In-house counsel's biggest headache

We spend a fair amount of time whaling on other law firms for things like hourly billing. But when a firm turns out a product that's valuable and useful, we want to make sure the firm gets its due. Ginormous (which should be a word) international law firm Fulbright & Jaworski released its Fourth Annual Litigation Trends Survey Findings last week, containing 52 pages of illuminating and actionable information generated by in-house counsel. Fulbright had an independent research firm survey 253 US corporate counsel and 50 UK in-house lawyers on everything from litigation costs and billing trends to regulatory matters and class actions. And what did in-house counsel report to be their leading legal headache?

(Wait for it ...)

Labor and employment cases.

Surprised? We're not. Oh, sure: securities litigation and patent litigation and class actions get more airtime. But every company has employees. (In a word: duh.) And if you have employees, you have employment issues.

According to the survey, 51% of respondents listed labor and employment matters as one of their greatest litigation concerns. Contracts was next at 41% (and some of those no doubt include things like noncompetes and nondisclosures). Regulatory matters (24%), securities litigation (22%), and intellectual property (also 22%) rounded out the top five of 16 categories (including "other").

Similarly, when asked about pending litigation matters, 43% cited labor and employment cases as among the three most common types. Contracts (34%) was the only other category to crack the litigation Mendoza line (20%).

At a time when many large law firms are scaling back their labor and employment departments, this area continues to keep corporate counsel awake at night. Hmmmm ...

There's a ton more data in the survey, which will likely lead to a few more posts on this site. In the meantime, you can get the survey findings free directly from Fulbright by clicking here. (You have to give up some contact information, but I think it's a fair trade.) You can then check out the detailed data here. Fulbright has a detailed press release and summary here.

Other blogs have also written about the survey. Check out Manpower's Mark Toth's entry here, Carolyn Elefant's post on Legal Blog Watch here, and Holden Oliver's piece in What About Clients? here.

As always, the moral is that lawyers should listen to their clients.

Ept managers lead to gruntled employees

Seventy-seven percent of Americans hate their jobs. This from a Gallup poll reported in TIME's Work in Progress blog by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen. (I first saw it in Diane Pfadenhauer's Strategic HR Lawyer blog.) Not a good statistic.

On the other hand, 90% of managers think they're in the top 10% of performers. This from a BusinessWeek poll of 2,000 US executives and middle managers (article here, poll results here). (Rob May's Businesspundit.com turned me on to these results.) Most of these respondents are, of course, wrong — and suffering from the Lake Wobegon effect.

Taking these two polls together leads to some conclusions. Most managers think they're swell (and executives are even worse — 97% put themselves in the top decile). But they can't all be that good. And if more than three fourths of their employees hate their jobs, then most of the managers must really stink.

Universal truth: Inept managers lead to disgruntled employees, which in turn lead to diminishing profits. (And employee lawsuits, of course.)

Parallel universal truth: Ept managers lead to gruntled employees, which in turn lead to minishing profits. (And fewer lawsuits.)

Now ept may be no more real a word than gruntled (or minishing for that matter), but your managers won't notice because they're too busy patting themselves on the back (and their employees are too busy working on their résumés). Focus on making your managers more ept (epter?), and you'll end up with fewer employees hating their jobs.

US workers most gruntled?

Hope you had a nice Labor Day weekend. You earned it. You worked hard. In fact, according to the International Labour Organization, you worked harder than everyone else. The ILO released a report yesterday showing that American workers were the most productive in the world.

Actually, it's not that you necessarily worked harder; many workers put in longer hours. Americans worked an average of 1,804 hours in 2006. Workers in seven Asian nations, including South Korea and China, averaged more than 2,200 hours. (Not surprisingly, the French rolled in for a total of only 1,564 hours.)

But as we've said in this space many times, it's not about the hours you work; it's about the value you create.

According to the report, the average American worker produced $63,885 of wealth in 2006, far more than the number-two producers, the Irish, who averaged $55,986. What is more, the productivity gap between Americans and workers in other developed countries continued to widen.

Here's the ILO's explanation for the productivity increase:

Increase in productivity is mainly the result of firms better combining capital, labour and technology. A lack of investment in people (training and skills) as well as equipment and technology can lead to an underutilization of the labour potential in the world.

It says here that the more gruntled employees are, the more productive they are. Maybe American workers are more gruntled than their international counterparts.

The ILO is a UN agency based in Geneva. The report, called "Key Indicators of the Labour Market, 5th Edition," is available here. (From that page, you can either download a Windows-application version of the report — but why would you? — or you can download PDFs of the report in chunks.) The ILO's press release on the report is here, and The New York Times reports on it here (login may be required). The AP story, via The Boston Globe, is here.

Fire stupidly, lose your own job (eventually)

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned today, largely because of how he mishandled the firing of nine Assistant US Attorneys last year. We covered the story last March in "Attorneygate moral: Don't fire stupidly," where we sagely predicted that Gonzales would be out by Opening Day. (Missed it by this much.) For comprehensive background on the firings and their aftermath, read the excellent summaries at Peter Lattman's ever-fabulous Wall Street Journal Law Blog here and at the Washington Post's site here.

Gruntled Employees doesn't much care about the politics of the issue. Instead, the important lesson for employers and managers and HR professionals is the one we talked about in March:

The moral is: Fire who you want to fire, own the decision, and then shut up about it.

It's hard to fire someone, if you're any kind of a real human being. And it should be, because it's someone else's life your messing with. You should struggle with the decision. But once you've made the decision, you have to act on it and own it. Resist the temptation to make explanations and excuses that (you hope) will get you or your company off the hook.

In the Attorneygate case, who is to say whether firing the AUSAs was fair? Doesn't matter (except to the AUSAs, their families, and the decisionmakers who pulled the trigger). The law says that they are subject to removal by the President. Period. They are — like most American workers — employees at will.

After-the-fact explanations for why you fired someone rarely tell the whole story. The real answers are usually incredibly complicated, and don't sound as clean as a better-manufactured reason. But the manufactured reason isn't the truth. And people will generally learn the truth, eventually. And when people start to see the holes in your just-right story, they're going to think you're covering up something more nefarious, like discrimination, or politics, or favoritism.

The Attorney General could have said this: "We fired these prosecutors because we wanted to make a change and put some other people in those spots. And the law says we can." It might not make for a pretty story, but it was probably the truth. The story would have died in a few days, and Alberto Gonzales might still be running the Justice Department and waiting for Justice Stevens to retire. Instead, it's Monster.com for him.

Don't fire stupidly. Fire smartly, quickly, and honestly. And then shut up.

So you want to be a barista ...

So it's Sunday and it's hot and I'm taking the family to the local pool. But I need my caffeine fix, and I'm trying to figure out the mechanics of sneaking a triple venti latte into the pool area without getting caught. I decide it's worth the risk, so we stop at the nearby Starbucks en route to the pool.

While I'm waiting for the barista to make my order, I notice a small table with a little sign and a pad of employment applications. As an employment lawyer, I'm always interested to see how businesses go about hiring new employees. I'm curious, especially with national employers, to see how many violations of state law (in my case, Massachusetts) the application has. I counted just two.

Now don't get me wrong. My purpose here is not to call out Starbucks, which is by all accounts a first-rate employer. Every state has slightly different employment laws, and a company that operates in multiple states has to pay attention to all of them. It's an enormous pain to have a different application for every state a company does business in. Many multistate employers try to synthesize the laws of their different states, and often include footnotes with state-required language. (Starbucks included language for California, Maryland, and — yes — Massachusetts. Just not all of it.)

But here's what the application does right. More than right. Better than just about every other application form I've ever read.

After asking all the usual job-application questions, it asks the following:

• Have you ever visited a Starbucks Coffee location? Where? Describe your experience.
• What do you like about coffee?
• Why would you like to work for Starbucks Coffee Company?
• Describe a specific situation where you have provided excellent customer service in your most recent position. Why was this effective?

Now the first and third questions are pretty basic. They probably get a lot of lame answers, which help weed out the barista pretenders.

But the second question and the fourth question are brilliant, and should be emulated by all employers.

Starbucks is all about two things: coffee and customer service. To attract the best employees, Starbucks looks to hire people who get coffee and get customer service. Judging from the top-quality service I get every day at the Starbucks near my office (the School Street store in Boston) — where Gregg, Meg, Theresa, Roger, and the other "partners" (as the company calls all its employees) make an extra effort to remember my name and my order — it seems to be working.

What questions can your company put on its job applications to make sure you attract employees who get what your company is all about?

(As for the minor Massachusetts statutory problems: give me a call, Starbucks, and I'll tell you what they are. On the house.)

Employee satisfaction for $2.40 a day

Have you gotten your iPhone yet? As a Mac fan (our entire law firm runs on Macs), I had no problem waiting in line for an hour at my local AT&T store last Friday evening. When I got there (about an hour after the iPhones went on sale), I was about fortieth in line. When I was seventh, they sold out. Would it have killed the AT&T store people to come out and count the people in line, and tell me, the six people in front of me, and everyone behind me that we were out of luck? Maybe.

Fortunately, a friend texted me that the Apple store near where I live had plenty. I went there, waited in no line, and had my new gadget in about five minutes. And I'm happy to report that it lives up to all the hype.

While there have been about a skitillion stories written about the iPhone (that's one followed by a wad of zeroes, or ten to the wad), one of the most interesting to me as an employer evangelist is this: Apple reportedly is giving each of its employees a free 8-gigabyte iPhone. I first read about this in John Moore's excellent marketing blog, Brand Autopsy. John is a brand guru who's worked with Starbucks and Whole Foods. His post on "Marketing to Employees" described the Apple employee giveaway, which was reported in the San Jose Mercury News. John writes:

Apple is doing a lot of things right in marketing the iPhone. But amidst all the iPhone hubbub, one vital marketing nugget is getting lost:

Apple is giving all its full-time U.S.-based employees an iPhone.

I am a huge proponent of companies spending marketing money on employees. It's simple. Astonish employees and they will, in turn, astonish customers. Giving every full-time employee a $600 (retail value) iPhone is an astonishing act that will only help to feed the already vibrant evangelical corporate culture within Apple.

[Other reports (MacRumors, Ars Technica) add that the iPhone giveaway also includes part-time employees who have been with Apple for at least a year.]

John's key line — "Astonish employees and they will, in turn, astonish customers" — reminds me of our post from last month, "Put your employees first and your customers second." In that piece, I described a recent British study that showed that employee satisfaction — more than customer satisfaction — was a leading indicator for company growth. The study talked about "emotional contagion," where the employees' good feelings rubbed off onto the customers.

This also reminds me about the Cornell study showing that bonuses were ten times more effective than merit increases in raising employee performance. (See "Bonuses: more bang for your buck.") If bonuses are more effective than raises, then iPhones and other employee giveaways are even more effective. Think about it: each 8 GB iPhone retails for $599. Ignore the fact that it costs Apple something less than that to make. Giving each Apple employee a $599 bonus would be nice, but it wouldn't really generate any excitement. And if you convert that $599 to a raise, it works out to less than 30 cents an hour for full-time employees, or $2.40 a day. Big whoop.

Instead of giving employees a 30-cent raise, Apple gave them a status symbol and a story to tell their friends and family. (And it got another news story out of the deal.)

The lesson for employers: find creative, surprising ways to reward your employees, instead of just a 3% merit increase. Your employees in turn will reward you with better performance.

Put your employees first and your customers second

Got an email a few weeks back from Siobhan Ford at the Harvard Business Review calling my attention to an article in their June issue. (Actually, her email ended up in my spam filter, because I forgot to turn off the "ignore all things Harvard" rule.) (Kidding.) She had found us through Frank Roche's excellent KnowHR blog (shout out, Frank), which has been a staple on our Blogroll (right) for quite some time.

Anyway, Siobhan pointed out this short piece by two professors from Manchester (UK) Business School, Gary Davies and Rosa Chun. Davies is a professor of corporate reputation (how cool a title is that?) and Chun is a professor of business ethics and social responsibility (slightly less cool, and harder to fit on a business card). Davies and Chun conducted field interviews with 4,700 customers and employees of 63 businesses. They learned that service companies were more likely to be growing if their employee satisfaction exceeded their customer satisfaction:

Our research shows two things: Employee and customer views strongly correlate, indicating that the former influences the latter; and year-on-year sales growth positively and significantly correlates with the size of the gaps between employee and customer views. The more the staff’s view outshines the customers’, the greater the sales growth, because, we believe, employee views tend to transfer to customers through the aptly termed process of emotional contagion.

"Emotional contagion," apparently, is the way that employees' good feelings rub off onto the customers. The professors also found that employee satisfaction was most influenced "by the perceived quality of both training and management and by how much autonomy workers have."

Bottom line for managers and HR: employee satisfaction can actually be used as a metric to provide a leading indicator for company growth. Maybe that will get the boardroom's attention.

The article, which is only slightly longer than this post, is available for free until June 27 here. Thanks to Siobhan for the tip, and sorry about the whole making-fun-of-Harvard's-blog-policy post. (Well, not really.)

"The dog ate my homework" excuses

Some employees just don't want to work. They might never admit it — perhaps not even to themselves — but the attentive manager or HR pro can usually tell who they are. They're often absent or late or have to leave early. Their lives are more chaotic than other employees', and they tend to bring their chaos to work with them (when they actually come to work).

And their excuses are often lame.

Let me be clear here: I'm not talking about employees who have health issues or family issues. There's an enormous difference between workers who want to work but have been stung by tragedy or bad luck and employees who really don't want to do their jobs and whose stories never quite seem authentic. When we were kids, they were the students who always had a tale about why they couldn't finish their assignments. "The dog ate my homework" was the classic, if apocryphal, story.

Here, then, is a list of excuses given by one office worker for her absences, tardiness, and early departures. They were collected by her coworkers and sent to me via a trusted source. The numbers in parentheticals represent the times she has used that excuse. A few references have been edited to avoid compromising the identity of the accidental employee or her sometime workplace:

• I have pinkeye (3)
• my child has whooping cough (2)
• I need to register my car with the DMV
• my childcare provider has norovirus (the cruise-ship disease), and can't care for the children
• my childcare provider is adopting a baby, and can't care for the children (4 total days off)
• I have migraines (3)
• my child has an ear infection (3)
• I have a sinus infection (6)
• I had food poisoning, or a family member did (4)
• I need to be present for mold remediation in my apartment [actually, this one's pretty clever — JS]
  
• my car was stolen (resulted in 3 days off)
• my neighbor moved out, so I have to be home for the cable guy to come and reconnect my cable (3) [unclear whether the neighbor moved out multiple times — JS]
  
• the airline canceled my return flight and failed to notify passengers
• I have to be home for a plumber to fix a leaky pipe 
  
• I found an injured wild bird in my backyard and needed to bring it to a vet
• I have an last-minute doctor's appointment (4)
• my cat is in traction following an unknown injury [trying to picture this — JS]
  
• I have an ovarian cyst (incorrectly self-diagnosed; turned out to be menstrual cramps)
• my cat requires oral medication (had to leave early for 3 days)
• my kids had a total meltdown and I just could not get them into the car (resulting in 14 late arrivals)
• my other cat is suffering from liver failure [probably looking for attention after the other cat's traction deal — JS]
  
• it snowed: kids refused to get into car until they were allowed to play in the snow for a while
  
• unexpected visit from in-laws (husband forgot to tell her)
  
• I have to be home for the electrician to come and fix an electrical problem [well, that is what they do — JS]
  
• my daycare provider is just not feeling well (3)
• my daycare provider is on holiday (2)
• I am suffering from a virus (can't remember name of it, but did recall that it was a third-world malnutrition virus that was wiped out sometime back in the 1960s)
• the starter in my car is broken (which my husband diagnosed over the phone)
• I just need a day to clean my house (5)
• I need to prepare for my child's birthday party (5)
• I need to prepare for our vacation (5)
• I need to accompany my husband to his eye-tumor medical appointment (turned out to be a stye)
• I need to get my car reconditioned so that we can sell it (update: still has the same car 4 months later) [maybe a "For Sale" sign would help — JS]
  
• my coworker made me laugh so hard that my asthma is acting up (2) [turnabout is fair play; wait to see how much the coworker laughs after reading this — JS]

It probably takes more energy to come up with these stories than it would to simply quit. If you have an employee like this, help him or her come to that conclusion. And if you've come across other dog-ate-my-homework excuses like these, post a comment.

The right way to be a boss

Last week, I was blasting overwrought and overwritten employee handbooks. (See "The world's shortest employee handbook.") I called attention to the Alabama A&M University personnel manual and its bereavement-leave policy in particular. The bereavement policy is robotically impersonal. Imagine being a valued member of the A&M faculty or staff, losing a family member, and then having to parse this:

Staff members shall, upon request, be granted up to three (3) days annually of bereavement leave for the death of a parent, spouse, child, brother or sister, grand parents [sic], grand parents-in-law, grandchild, son or daughter-in-law, mother-in law, father-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, step children, children-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and first and second cousins. Other relationships are excluded unless there is a guardian relationship. Such leave is non-accumulative, and the total amount of bereavement leave will not exceed three days within any fiscal year. If additional days of absences are necessary, employees may request sick or annual leave, after providing an explanation of extenuating circumstances.

Now compare this sterile handling of employee-family death to the following tale from Brian McGrory's column in last week's Boston Globe. McGrory writes about a man named Jack Pichnarcik, whose 16-year-old son Mark died of leukemia. McGrory then writes about how the man's boss, trucking-parts-company owner Brian Pomerleau, treated his employee:

When Mark went into the hospital last November, Pomerleau told Jack to go be with his son, however long it was, and rest assured he wouldn't miss a day of pay.

He slipped Jack a couple of thousand extra dollars here and there over the next few months.

On the eve of Mark's death, Pomerleau quietly picked out a cemetery plot and made all the funeral arrangements himself, then headed to Boston to tell the Pichnarciks that everything was ready and funded, no questions asked or money accepted.

To me, Pomerleau shrugged it off, saying, "Hey, I made a few extra dollars in my life, so it's always nice to help someone you know."

This is the right way to be a boss. If employers acted more like Brian Pomerleau than like the handbook drones of Alabama A&M, they would attract better talent, and their companies would be more successful. Corporate bean counters who obsess over whether a bereaved employee took a day too many or lost a relative too distant should rethink their careers and find work that keeps them away from people.

Brian McGrory's complete column, called "Final Say," is here. Its title refers to the column's being his last, as the Globe has named Brian its news editor. Congratulations, Brian, and keep up the fine work.

The world's shortest employee handbook

We've talked before about HR professionals' and lawyers' propensity to overwrite when it comes to employee policies. (See, for example, "A two-word corporate blogging policy.") We make a lot of money writing personnel manuals for clients. But a question we often ask is: "Do you really need one?" While it's understandable and appropriate for an employer to make sure that its employees know what the rules are, a comprehensive employee handbook with Hammurabiesque (admittedly, not a word you see often) edicts on employee conduct can cause more harm than good.

The most common downside to having a personnel handbook is the risk of unintentionally giving up management rights and creating inadvertent employee contracts (as opposed to "advertent" ones?). Caselaw abounds where companies have written handbooks setting out rules for employees to follow only to have a court conclude that the employer is also contractually obligated to follow the handbook. And many courts have held that the lawyerly disclaimer buried in the introduction ("Management reserves the right to blah blah blah ...") doesn't get the company off the hook.

Another problem w